She continues to make jokes in this moment, and I suppose we’re supposed to laugh. So she tells him she’s going to kill herself. Bruner’s office (he reads the entire text, by the way, which is so beyond inappropriate I cringed so hard my skeleton left my body). Nadine then stole her mom’s car and wound up at a playground, where she accidentally texted a graphic sex proposal to her crush. She’s had a horrible day-she wouldn’t get out of the car to go to school, so her mom took her to work, where they had a terrible fight. Bruner that she’s going to kill herself, and describes in detail the way which she would prefer to do it. Nadine confides in him, and he makes fun of her and puts her down, over and over. Again, I thought I would dislike this character just for his cheesy concept, but as I watched their relationship unfold, it became so much more than that. So Nadine has no one to sit with at lunch, and turns to her history teacher Mr. Nadine’s depression makes her hate the world, and part of this friendship breakup, I think, is that Krista doesn’t want to hate it with her anymore. Krista wants to date someone, go to a party, make some new friends. When Krista and Darian start dating, Krista pleads tiredly with Nadine to be reasonable. When she drinks with Krista, Nadine’s the one puking at the end of the night. Nadine has a saved prescription bottle of antidepressants from the month after her father died. We could say that the Krista/Darian dating thing set off Nadine’s depression, but there’s evidence it was there before. She cuts ties with Krista, and for the rest of the movie, we follow Nadine’s spiral downward into a major depressive episode. And when Krista, her one friend, begins dating her perfect brother Darian (Blake Jenner), Nadine truly becomes isolated. Maybe we could’ve written her behavior off as “angst” before, but now, Nadine is depressed. When we meet Nadine again five years later, she hates everyone (herself the most) and her relationships with her mother and brother have disintegrated completely. Her dad takes her out for cheeseburgers to help ease her pain-and has a heart attack and dies on the way home. Her relationship with her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) has always been tumultuous, but her dad had her back, and eventually she found solace at school in her one great friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson).įlash forward to a teen angst moment in 2011: Nadine gets a terrible haircut and is completely distraught. She takes us back in time, and explains that she’s the black sheep in her family-while her brother has succeeded socially and at school, she has struggled.
And that’s where The Edge of Seventeen ultimately fails. Nadine’s mental illness and grief, her family trauma, her self-hatred and destructive behavior-all of these point to something much heavier than teen angst. While The Edge of Seventeen tries to be the familiar teen comedy, it feels as though Nadine is being forced into that narrative.
#THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN MOVIE#
I was not prepared for a depressed character who feels suicidal, and even less prepared for the movie to not take her seriously. And I knew I was in for some teenage comedy nostalgia. I knew I’d probably really like Hailey Steinfeld as the protagonist Nadine.
I knew I probably wouldn’t like Woody Harrelson’s teacher character, just because he seemed like a cheesy trope. I went to see The Edge of Seventeen with some preconceived notions from watching the trailer. Content warning: discussion of depression and suicidal thoughts.
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